Aside from a couple of recent Gameboy Advance ports, the Breath of Fire series has been on hiatus since the fourth installment for the PlayStation was released in mid-2000, and Capcom intends to reverse that hiatus very soon by releasing the next game in the Breath of Fire saga on the PlayStation 2.

Breath of Fire V takes place in the subterranean city of Shelter, which was fled to in the future after a debilitating enviromental disaster. The game tells the tale of a character named, or shall we say numbered, Ryu=1/8733, who is a member of an elite security faction called Ranger. After being assigned to patrol one of the biochemical plants on the surface, Ryu meets up with a winged young lady named Nina, and tries to fight off the unidentified creature placing Nina in peril.

Capcom's pulling out all the stops to create a fresh new story, and the gameplay and battle systems are no exception -- two new mechanisms called the PETS (Positive Encounter and Tactics System) and the SOL (Scenario Overlay System) promise innovative gaming experiences.

The purpose of the PETS is to allow the players to set traps, dummies, and other hazards for monsters before actually engaging in battle, allowing a certain amount of strategy not recently heard of in a console RPG, and the SOL system guarantees that much replay value is to be had -- every time the player begins a new game, the games that have previously been played will have effects on the new one. Items and experience points will be retrieved from previous save files, and new gaming events and side quests can also become available.

As is to be expected with any freshly announced game, details on this installment are still relatively scarce. What we do know, however, points at Breath of Fire V being a radically different style of game than its 16 and 32-bit predecessors, based on the very groundbreaking character designs and conceptual art.

Check out information on the previous Breath of Fire titles on our games page, and keep watching RPGamer for more information on this new game as it breaks.